It is the lie that will not die. CBS News’ Gayle King, whose online bio claims she is a journalist, agreed this weekend that the Obama administration was scandal-free. This is an obvious falsehood, one that I and others have addressed already in great detail. But like a bad disease, it just keeps coming back.
The moment occurred as King, whose job title includes “television journalist,” interviewed former first lady Michelle Obama Saturday at the Essence Festival in New Orleans.
“During Barack’s inauguration, we made sure that the crowd looked like all of America. You know, having the Tuskegee Airmen, having civil rights folks, having folks who had marched — you know, you could look out at his crowd and you would see America. All of it,” the former first lady recalled.
Her point, which included the claim that Trump’s inauguration was not inclusive, unlike Obama’s, led up to her point that people like herself are required to be better than perfect in order to be treated equally.
“And I had to sit in that audience, one of a handful of people of color, and then listen to [President Trump’s inaugural] speech and then all that I had sort of held onto for eight years,” Michelle Obama continued, “watching my husband get raked over the coals, feeling like we had to do everything perfectly, you know, no scandal, no nothing. No nothing, y’all!”
King, an alleged journalist who once vacationed in Tahiti with the Obamas, nodded along, adding solemnly, “No scandals. Yes.” The crowd loved it.
Here is @MichelleObama claiming that the media were so rough on the Obama Administration, they had to be “better than perfect,” with “no scandals.”
CBS’s @GayleKing agrees: “No scandals!” pic.twitter.com/7f2A07fehV
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) July 8, 2019
The former first lady is not the problem in this story. Michelle Obama is free to believe whatever lunacy she pleases. First ladies have been into far, far weirder things. The real issue here is the journalist who not only allowed a bald-faced lie to go unchecked, but actually agreed with her interviewee!
The Obama administration is book-ended by scandal. King knows this. The eight-year Obama era opened with a voter intimidation scandal and ended with a Russian election interference scandal. (No one seems to realize, including Joe Biden, but if you say that happened, then you’re also saying it happened on Obama’s watch.)
And then there are controversies in-between. There were abuses of power, gun-running operations, extrajudicial executions of U.S. citizens, weaponized federal tax collection agencies, wiretapped reporters, a murdered U.S. ambassador, you name it.
As I have written elsewhere in response to the Obama acolytes who keep repeating this “no scandals” nonsense:
Between 2008 and 2016, at least seven American citizens were killed by drone strikes. Of those seven, only one was targeted intentionally by the U.S. government for an extrajudicial killing.
During the Obama administration, the Internal Revenue Service was weaponized against conservative groups.
Obama’s Office of Personnel Management was hacked because of appointees’ negligence.
Obama’s secretary of state maintained a homebrew server in her bathroom so as to evade record-keeping laws and department procedures, placing classified information at risk and on the hard drive of a very active online pervert who could have been especially susceptible to hacking.
The Justice Department spied on journalists’ phone activity, including their home phone activity, without notifying their editors. And Obama’s secretary of Veterans Affairs resigned in disgrace after it was revealed that an estimated 307,000 veterans died awaiting medical attention.
There is much, much more where this comes from, but I have a word count to maintain and an editor who would like to have dinner with his family.
I understand that the line between legitimate journalism and puff-piece news entertainment is an extremely thin one at the obnoxiously twee network morning news programs. But just because King works for one of these shows does not mean she cannot at least pretend to take her job title seriously.
